Love guns

It's not like Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab was completely naked. Not even a
member of Machine Gun Fellatio would remove all their clothes during their first
show at Los Angeles's celebrated Viper Room. Well, not a male member. Not
without a Pooh Bear strapped to their tackle.

"The first problem," says the Sydney rock identity formerly known as Glenn
Dormand, "was that it took a really long time to get my clothes off, because I
had the broken collar bone (more on this later). But we were still goin' nuts. I
mean, I wanted to give the people the full show."

Sadly, Viper Room security staff have prudish ideas about acceptable
behaviour for rock bands. It appears that even on Sunset Strip, a large
Australian man simulating sex with patrons while wearing nothing but sunglasses,
amusing facial hair and a Pooh Bear is beyond the pale.

At first, Von Loopin Stab thought the repeated, booming command to 'Put your
clothes back on!' was an improvised vocal from singer Pinky Beecroft. "It was
kind of in time with the music, so I just joined in, humping away," he says.

"Then these enormous black guys started walking towards me and it became
obvious the venue was shutting me down. It was a bit scary. I guess it would
have been scarier if there were two very large black men coming at me saying,
'Take your clothes off!'"

MGF's final US concert last month - complete with appearances from porn star
Ron Jeremy and LA guitar prince Dweezil Zappa - was the culmination of a
typically insane 48 hours in the life of our most freakish cult band.

It involved a flattering offer to open for Radiohead at Madison Square Garden
- an offer eventually overruled by that band's record company - and an
unfortunate encounter with a mechanical bull. Hence the collar bone.

"The whole Radiohead thing put me in a crazy mood," says Von Loopin Stab. "To
be honest, there was quite a lot of alcohol and possibly a lot of rock cocaine
involved, too. I was just on a bender and there was this cowboy bar on Sunset
Boulevard.

"So we go in there and I'm completely off my tits. Invincible. I'm feeling
100 feet tall. So I decide to ride the mechanical bull. And I take a camera on
there as well, to film the whole event from the inside."

The footage, although probably not for the squeamish, is likely to be a
highlight of the next MGF DVD.

"I didn't know at the time, but I'd chipped the top off my bone and there
were all these fragments sticking straight into my muscle. By the time we got to
the Viper Room, I was really feeling it."

If this tale isn't cautionary enough, it's appropriate to mention that Pinky
Beecroft, Machine Gun Fellatio's co-founder and "the most reluctant lead singer
in the history of lead singing", has now been sober for the best part of a
year.

As the former Matt Ford, Beecroft had put such flamboyant '80s bands as Silk
and the Slatterns behind him for a viable career as a TV writer when Tim
Freedman introduced him to Dormand in the mid-'90s. The three of them would
share a song of the year ARIA in 1998 for the Whitlams' signature tune, No
Aphrodisiac.

By that time, Dormand and Ford had adopted their pseudonyms and made their
bed with a gaggle of other spaced-out superheroes from Sydney's seamy rock
underground: bass player 3kShort, soul singer the Widow Jones, drummer Bryan
Ferrysexual and guitarist Loveshark.

It was occasional ring-in vocalist and stripper KK Juggy, however, who would
seal 2002's most unlikely platinum success story. When Melbourne universities
began banning the group on the basis of her routine disrobement, the ensuing
publicity sent their Paging Mr Strike album into the ARIA top 10.

With their stage design of flashing neon, their incredible array of
outrageous party threads and bad-taste prop gags, the following year found
Machine Gun Fellatio among the most popular draws on the Australian pub
circuit.

They were never going to be embraced by all-comers, of course. In a local
scene that continually celebrates such staid and predictable denim rock as
Powderfinger, MGF to many are just some cheap, gaudy, glam-porn gimmick.

For the rest of us, that's attractive enough. But sweep aside their twirling
tassels, multi-pronged dildos and potboiler tunes such as Mutha Fukka On a
Motorcycle and Rollercoaster, and Beecroft's songs provide a
surprisingly gritty and honest insight into love, sex and loneliness in the
modern age.

"I actually just wanna be a nice, well-behaved boy," the singer pleads. "But
whenever I think I'm being polite, people interpret it as rudeness. I have that
kind of face that says 'I'm takin' the piss' when I'm not. Or maybe I am. Who
knows? I get confused. But I feel in my head that I'm just a shy, innocent baby
lamb.

"Last night, on stage in Coffs Harbour, I kept looking at Von Loopin Stab and
thinking, 'You really are nuts. Were you always this nuts? Do you take anything
for this condition?' Sometimes I'll be looking at Chit Chat or KK and I become a
viewer rather than a participant. I think that's probably good."

Beecroft's internet diary is an open window through his ostensibly
piss-taking facade. His unhealthy obsession with Polly Harvey, first from an
impossible distance and, much later, quaking in an adjacent aeroplane seat on
the 2003 Big Day Out, poignantly exposes the rock-star wannabe in all of us.

In fact, it sometimes seems that the sexy tomfoolery part of Machine Gun
Fellatio's image undersells Beecroft's gift for sensitive personal expression.
He hopes so. "That would be good, as an inbuilt mechanism to stop me
disappearing up my own arse.

"A lot of that so-called sensitive stuff is basically from having hangovers,"
he says. "In this business, you have so many bad hangovers, so many bad mornings
where you haven't slept enough, and you just don't have the energy or the
ability to hide how you feel.

"I guess you could call me the Celine Dion of Machine Gun Fellatio. She'd be
fine as long as she had the rest of this band hanging out with her. If she was
the lead singer of the B-52's, things could have been very different. And I
would certainly like to hear the results."

The personality conflicts inherent in Beecroft's analogy are obvious. For
sanity and sobriety reasons, these days he spends as little downtime as possible
with Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab "and certain other members of the band".

"I don't talk about it much in the press," he says slowly, "because you can
wind up looking like a sanctimonious dickhead. But the reason I'm sober now is
because last November I went very close to not being able to live any more.

"It's not like anyone's holding anybody else down and forcing drugs down
their throats. I mean, that could never happen in our band, because everybody's
too busy hoarding them to take later. But I am an innocent baby lamb," he
repeats for the record, "who's been corrupted by six psychopaths."

Speaking from a separate location between Coffs Harbour and Yamba, Von Loopin
Stab doesn't paint a radically different picture.

"It's like when you go out for a drive with your family and everyone's eating
red lollies. One minute everyone's laughing, the next someone's in tears. Except
we're all on different red lollies. You can be fighting like motherf---ers one
minute, but then you come off stage and it's all hugs and kisses."

That was particularly so the night before these interviews, when MGF won an
IF Award for their first movie soundtrack, Gettin' Square. The honour
went some way to redressing a grave injustice at last month's ARIAs, which
lauded the usual safe suspects while refusing to acknowledge MGF's unique
approach and achievements with even a single nomination.

"Yeah, it was nuts. I was surprised," Von Loopin Stab admits. "(Paging Mr
Strike) sold about 90,000 or something. Rollercoaster had massive
airplay and Pussytown was the most added song two weeks in a row on
different radio stations.

"I just don't think people take us seriously," he concludes, "which is maybe
fair enough, because we don't give them much of a chance."

One review from MGF's recent New York show illustrates his point. "At best,"
said Popmatters.com, "it was like a bunch of session guys got together,
smoked a lot of pot and decided that they would start a band as a joke."

"Oh! That's not very nice," Von Loopin Stab retorts, evidently stung.

It went on: "At worst, it was like a really good wedding band that drank
punch spiked with an unidentified hallucinogen."

"Yeah, that's better. I like that. I'm mostly offended by the 'session
player' part. They obviously weren't paying attention to any of the
playing."

Whether outraged or dismissive, the rock mainstream's sniffy attitude to MGF
is a good indication of how conservative the medium has become. Pinky Beecroft
is anything but disappointed that they haven't been embraced by the
ARIA-bestowing mainstream.

"Without mentioning names," he says, "I'm stunned that you can get up every
day and write a similar song to the one you did yesterday and be quite serious
about it.

"If you meet the average Australian one on one, mostly they've got a pretty
good sense of humour, and yet most of the music they listen to takes itself
really seriously and doesn't see the irony in all that grimacing.

"It's essentially a stupid, stupid occupation. You stand onstage and you
realise you're pulling exactly the same pose and facial expression that 965
billion people have pulled before you. You're singing yet another song about how
much you want to have sex with someone. There is something inherently dumb about
that, which I find vastly amusing a lot of the time.

"I go through six completely different mood changes in any given five minutes
of the day, so I'm quite stunned by Matchbox 20 and Nickelback. I dunno, I don't
get it."

That shoe is on the other foot, of course, when MGF get down to negotiations
in the country that made Matchbox 20 and Nickelback rich.

"In America we probably couldn't have handicapped ourselves more by calling
ourselves Machine Gun Fellatio," Beecroft says. "You have meetings when you're
not doing a show and people look at you like, 'Are you f---in' insane? Do you
really think you have a chance? Here?'

"But I've seen the same look in people's eyes when we started in Australia.
So I tend to get simultaneously depressed and kinda cocky, like, 'Well, we'll
see.'"

MGF are already planning a longer, wider assault on American tastebuds in
2004. And far from scaling down expectations in the wake of Paging Mr
Strike's success, Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab is eagerly talking up their
yet-to-be-recorded follow-up.

"I think this next one's gonna be much bigger than the last one," he says,
citing as evidence one new song titled Hollywood, and another, about the impact
of global warming on polar bears, titled What the F--- Do I Care?

"We're feeling pretty confident with what Pinky and Shark and 3k are writing.
Really, the whole band is writing some very, very good stuff now."

Then there's the year's most coveted pop support role. Absurd as it sounds,
MGF will open for Duran Duran and Robbie Williams in family-packed arenas around
the country in December.

"That's f---in' hysterical," Von Loopin Stab splutters. "A couple of members
of the band were a bit freaked out, like, 'Why would we play with Robbie
Williams?' I'm more like, 'Well, why wouldn't we play to 150,000 people?'

"It's quite subversive, I think. I think it's gonna be a kind of collision of
cultures. Robbie's dry at moment. Apparently we can't have drugs or alcohol
anywhere backstage. So I dunno what he's gonna do.

"I'm trying to get rid of the Pooh Bear act because it's a bit old-hat now,
but there's something very naughty in me. The idea of doing the Pooh in front of
150,000 kids and mums and dads - I'm not sure I can resist that moment."

Machine Gun Fellatio play at the Corner Hotel tonight and tomorrow night,
with guests Mandy Kane and Pre-Shrunk.